View From My Window

When I handed Tanmay Yarmachu ’23 his diploma on May 12, Fort Worth Country Day had 4,537 graduates. In eight years of handing out those priceless pieces of parchment to the last 759 graduates, I have often wondered about the paths our Falcons will end up taking.

Certainly, some of our alumni have deferred their college admission for a year of exploration. “Gap years” between high school and college have been a thing, at least since my father did one in 1950-51. If you knew someone in college who started as a 19- or 20-year-old, you probably knew someone more focused than the typical college freshman on the value of the studies they were doing.

After eight years of graduations and hundreds of momentous, high-school-ending handshakes, I find myself aligning more and more with William Fitzsimmons, long-tenured Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid at Harvard University. As a rookie College Counselor in 1985, I was given Fitzsimmons’s letter touting the benefits of a gap year. Fitzsimmons recognized the value of taking a break in the midst of the traditional 16-year run of school in the United States. The 80-100 Harvard students who took that break each year reportedly got the value too: Harvard’s daily student newspaper, The Crimson, reported (May 19, 2000) that students who had taken a year off found the experience “so valuable that they would advise all Harvard students to consider it.”

The incredibly consistent story I hear from those of you who went straight from Country Day Lane to college is how wellprepared you were. You speak Spanish or French much better than your peers with similar high school transcripts. You write papers that lead professors to ask admiringly, “Where did you go to high school?” You take advantage of office hours right from the beginning of your college days, and you often teach others to do the same.

Those stories make us all proud. We can also be proud of those of you who took different paths. You might have gone straight from FWCD to work. Maybe you started your own company. You might have joined AmeriCorps or been involved in mission work. Maybe you did a formal gap year between K-12 and college. Maybe, on the other hand, you arrived at college knowing how to study but not feeling emotionally ready to take advantage of all of the opportunities.

Whatever your path, I would really appreciate hearing stories about your 18- to 20-year-old experiences. As we embark on the School’s next steps and build the next strategic plan this fall, and as we use that planning work to rethink our hopes for each of our graduates in the years ahead, we will be considering our mission: “to foster the intellectual, physical, emotional and ethical development of capable students.” We give ourselves quite a task with that mission statement, and we commit to that work as a college-preparatory school. In our 2023-24 planning, I think we need to stop and think about the different paths to college after an FWCD diploma, and we also need to consider how we support students who take paths that might not include college.

Eric Lombardi